NVIDIA BioNeMo releases RFD4-Proteina: reward-guided protein design model and NIM microservice
RFD4-Proteina, an open-model co-developed by NVIDIA BioNeMo and the Institute for Protein Design (UW), co-designs protein sequences and all-atom structures and uses reward-guided inference-time search to focus compute on promising candidates. The method uses a residue-level latent representation and engineered diffusion to cut sampling from ~400 to 60 steps, yielding ~3.8× faster generation and ~84% lower peak memory than RFD3 at 200 residues; the project provides an open GitHub model for development and a NIM microservice with an HTTP interface for rapid inference and automated campaigns (examples include PD-L1 binder design with hotspot constraints).